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The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?

nytimes.com

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Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?

#131

Post by BeeOnRope »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #121
BeeOnRope wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all relative. Do you mean it is slow compared to the portion with no overpasses, or slow compared to vehicles w/o dedicated lanes passing through the same intersections? Passing through intersections is never particularly fast (except perhaps at night on empty reads with sensors far enough away to turn the light green before you even get there) - but at peak times dedicated lanes help a lot even when intersectio…

It's slower than the car lanes; there are so many buses that the bus lane is more backed up than the car lanes. They are in the process of building a subway that'll take many of those buses out of downtown, though. (Ottawa, Canada).

Yes - a single dedicated bus lane doesn't work if there are so many buses that lane is busier than the car lanes! That would be a fairly unusual case in my experience though.

Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?

#132

Post by oppositelock »

exabrial wrote: post #124

NYC's subway's are at a halt unfortunately. The MTA unions have paralyzed innovation and development. The West coast has an opportunity to one up them, but a lot of money gets appropriated and given to contractors without a lot of actual results a lot of the time.

It's so sad to see how the NYC's subway is falling into ruin. I spent my adolescent years living in Brooklyn in the 1980's, and used the subways a lot. Pre-Giuliani, they were filthy and covered with a lot of urban camouflage, but they could be trusted to be there roughly on schedule. When they replaced them with the shiny stainless steel cars, it was even nicer. I moved away from NYC, but whenever I visit, it's sad to see the network, which worked really well in the past, be in such a sad shape. It's like the system got built, and then never maintained. What kind of idiots run such a large system in a world class city?

Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?

#133

Post by astura »

skookumchuck wrote: post #15
flexie wrote: post #10

The article doesn't really mention that most of these expansions will be ready 20-40 years into the future (if not delayed). If you buy a house in an LA suburb hoping that you will soon get subway nearby, you might get it once the mortgage is paid out and the kids have left for college. What will the technology be like in 20-40 years? Everybody surely have cheap electric scooters and bikes or other electric devices a…

> 20-40 years into the future (if not delayed) For comparison, the first intercontinental railroad was built by hand and muscle in 6 years. Including the bridges, cuts, and grading. Including through a mountain range.

Um... Its estimated that somewhere between 1,000-2,000 people died building the first transcontinental railroad. That wouldn't exactly be acceptable today.

Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?

#134

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

hapless wrote: post #130
hannasanarion wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just the thing though: Western cities are increasingly de-prioritizing cars, and Eastern cities are falling behind. There are parts of Phoenix that are more bikable than much of New York. LA, SF, Portland, and Seattle have started pouring money into their new transit systems, while MTA and NJ Transit and Port Authority keep having their budgets cut, leading to reliability so low that it's driving people into c…

The MTA and Port Authority are the best funded systems _in the world_. The problem is that they waste money profligately. What takes other cities millions of dollars and tens of weeks takes New York billions and decades. The reason no one wishes to add billions to the MTA’s already large capital budget is that 99% of the money disappears into a black hole

That's because only 50% of the money goes towards things you expect it to go toward: labor costs, operations, and maintenance. The other 50% goes to unfunded pensions, debt service, and health care (mostly unfunded).

http://interactive.nydailynews.com/project/mta-spending/

Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?

#135

Post by marssaxman »

francisofascii wrote: post #71

For the West Coast, the simplest solution is electric buses with dedicated lanes. Buses better serve the existing low density sprawl than trains. Lack of infrastructure is not the problem, the roads are already built. The real problem of course is lack of political will. Every road with two lanes gets at least one dedicated bus lane. Single occupant traffic would slow to a crawl making the buses faster. Buses would r…

Simplest solution for the transit planner, maybe; but for people who want to get around, who wants to be stuck in a bus? Why should we settle for a crappy, minimally-functional experience? Let's build good transit that people will actually want to use.

Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?

#137

Post by munk-a »

leetcrew wrote: post #129
jcranmer wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single bus can move about 100-200 people. A single subway train can move about 1000-1500 people, an order of magnitude more.

wouldn't it be more fair to compare a single subway car with a bus? nothing stops you from running a "train" of buses.

It isn't really that fair, the critical time sink starts shifting to offload/onload time and there is a lot of waste having to load each bus individually.

This is why developed subway systems with high usage end up with large trains, that's the best way to speed up the system, reducing the delay caused by trains waiting for other trains that are stopped in the station.

Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?

#138

Post by staplers »

cmiller1 wrote: post #115
lambdasquirrel wrote: post #105

The thing that makes mass transit work is walkability. There are 3 million people in NYC who use the subway every day. They can do that because the walkability of the neighborhoods complements the mass transit. In some European cities, the bicycle is its own form of transit, and it can likewise be that because separate bike paths exist that complement the walkable structure of those cities. If we want to actually bea…

>If we want to actually beat the East Coast on transportation Why does it have to be a competition? I'd like to see both coasts have great systems for transportation!

Competition is the easiest path to refinement. See the space race.

Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?

#139

Post by naravara »

staplers wrote: post #138
cmiller1 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If we want to actually beat the East Coast on transportation Why does it have to be a competition? I'd like to see both coasts have great systems for transportation!

Competition is the easiest path to refinement. See the space race.

Competition also drove the Soviets to get lots of their people killed because they cared more about hitting arbitrary deadlines to win the geopolitical dick-measuring contest than they did about safety or even accomplishing their goals.

(And before I get called out: Yes, I realize NASA got people killed for the same reason but the difference is seriously orders of magnitude. NASA's failures were publicized while the USSR's were covered up. Many cosmonauts perished and all records of them were removed, they were airbrushed out of photos, erased from official documents, etc. The world will never know their names.)

Re: The West Coast is beating the East Coast on transportation?

#140

Post by ummonk »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #109
plants wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or even how insanely crowded NYC is in general. It might make sense to have scooters in a less crowded neighborhood in Brooklyn, but try driving through lower Manhattan on a scooter...

Why would it be worse than a bike?

It's too crowded for bikes too. People take the subway and then walk the last few blocks.
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